


The day was early and the sun so young

by laughingpineapple



Category: Pyre (Video Game)
Genre: Early Days, Gen, snakes doing snake things. heralds doing herald things.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-08
Updated: 2020-11-08
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:53:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27253732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laughingpineapple/pseuds/laughingpineapple
Summary: The Wild Witch bestowed blessings, curses, talismans, arcane artifacts, worms, vocal frogs, interesting rocks, unwanted suggestions that took root centuries later in a different person than the one she was talking to.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 9
Collections: Trick or Treat Exchange 2020





	The day was early and the sun so young

**Author's Note:**

  * For [azurefishnets](https://archiveofourown.org/users/azurefishnets/gifts).



There was a stilled quality to the air in Sung-Gries’ dying throes. With the fading of the world-titan, the world could not keep turning as it had before: it waited, in a form of mourning, stars fading in its wake as a form of deference. After filling the sky for days, the thunderous echo of the titan’s coils crashing down like stones had cleared the place of impact. It kept rumbling far away, on the wide open seas around them and toward the continent to the South, where its roar caught by surprise the flocks of birds stationed in the Wakingwood.

For many moons, the Scribes stood on the setting mountain. They tended to their wounds, they waited themselves, they were eight and now two more, they took in the emptiness of the sky, while the caves and tunnels deep under their feet contracted like lungs and expanded once more, taking in the cold northern air to secret lakes, again and again.

In a shallow pit still filled with shadows, Molten Milithe meditated over this coming and going, her own breath slowing down to nothingness, stretching far past the hour. New truths filled the dark places in the wake of the world-titan, ideas no-one had ever thought. They prickled her skin like pleasures. A hand clasped hers. Her breath hitched. A stalactite fell, far below.

“You burned,” Celeste said, still like a statue behind Milithe’s back. She had not heard her approach. “Explain.”

Milithe turned around and raised snakes like tendrils to examine the body next to hers. None of the Eight would have dared disturb her, but they were two more now, star-blessed. She and the intruder cast their glow over the pit’s walls, Milithe with her lantern held aflame by sorcery, Celeste like a small sun settling among these modest rocks, while the celestial body that was and was not her slowly rose across the mountain slope.

A shadow lingered near the entrance, cautious, unformed, never far from Celeste’s orbit. They were two more now, or one, but split. Oh Murr was a fool, but a bewitching one indeed. _A moonlit vision_ , he’d said, radiant with glory and doom! _To make two, the day and the night of this new world to come, a feat never attempted by emperor nor sorcerer_. Milithe had easily given in to that temptation and regretted it since. Life created for a purpose: the Eight had taken such a heavy burden on their shoulders. Her snakes hissed: as they felt her dark hair, she had expected to inhale the earthly smells of the materials they Eight had used to create them, the blood and salts and ground seeds held together by Yslach’s distilled thought. That was true, yet not all. She felt now that the fixed herald was far more than the life infused in her, and was brimming with elements and processes unknown. The Two were both less and more than the rest of them, a truth as fearsome as it was, for once, humbling.

“Thou burnssssssst. Explain,” she replied at last.

“I owe no explanation for my nature.”

“’tis not about owing, hhrrngggggggghhh.” Her burst of impatience dissipated, as it is not fitting to show ire in the presence of the sacred and the astral nor in that of a child, nor certainly both at once. She explained: “’tissssss a desire burning insssssside thee, until it sssssparks into motion. Creation. Transformation. Discovery. Ssssshould it get thee too close to the fire, it would sssssssstill be worth the prize. Ssssssuch is my nature. Consider thy burning, o fixed one. Heed its lesssssssons.”

“That suffices. I see.”

The lantern’s glow caressed Celeste’s back, joining her light as she walked away. The mountain’s breath stopped; a time of silence would follow. The herald carried her answer like a broken toy, something she would count among her possessions, having asked for it with the clarity of a bright pupil, but that she did not deem worthy of any more exploration. Pity that. Milithe felt her days ebb and flow through tunnels and secret caves, not for long still. She would not be there to understand the place of these two beings in the wider sphere of the world and in the many circles traced by their own lives. Pity that, indeed. Such grand research and no-one to carry it out.

Milithe lowered her lantern. Its flame was reflected by two yellow eyes shining in the shadows, remote and trained on her like a conjunction of faraway planets. It was a time of silence, for the unknowing and the unknowable; they stood and breathed together until the sun’s first rays breached the small pit, and went about their day.

[Illustrated by Andrea!](https://twitter.com/AndreaMcKid/status/1367964267719311361)


End file.
